


A Completely Exhaustive and Accurate List of All Fandom Deletions Ever

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [1]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:07:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: An archived version of two tumblr posts on the history of fandom deletions, now with added meta commentary
Series: March Meta Matters [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Kudos: 20
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. A History of Fandom Purges

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this by request and for the March Meta Matters Challenge
> 
> https://marchmetamatterschallenge.dreamwidth.org/
> 
> Chapters 1 and 2 are the original posts. Chapter 3 is my commentary. Chapter 4 is some excerpts from reblogs and spinoff posts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The original tumblr post

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted November 24, 2018-11-24.
> 
> Originally here:  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/180460944454/a-history-of-fandom-purges
> 
> I've corrected an embarrassing typo, but this is otherwise as close as I can make it to its Tumblr formatting.
> 
> It had 37,115 notes on March 1st, 2020 as I was archiving it on AO3.

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

  * **2002** \- FFN bans porn
  * **2002** \- FFN bans RPF
  * **2004** \- FFN bans script format
  * **2005** \- FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  * **2007** \- Strikethrough, Boldthrough
  * **2009** \- GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  * **2010** \- FFN forums deleted
  * **2011** \- Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
  * **2012** \- major FFN crackdown on porn
  * **2014** \- Quizilla shuts down
  * **2015** \- Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home got destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.

#fandom history #fandom meta


	2. A New History of Fandom Purges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second tumblr post

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted October 15, 2019.
> 
> Originally here:  
https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/188360541394/a-new-history-of-fandom-purges
> 
> This is as close as I can make it to its Tumblr formatting.
> 
> It had 38,547 notes on March 1st, 2020 as I was archiving it on AO3.

On November 24th, 2018, I posted [a list of major deletions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981978/chapters/54943057) of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

**HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!**

  * **1992** \- [Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed](https://fanlore.org/wiki/A_Matter_Of_Willful_Copyright_Infringement)
  * **1995** \- Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites
  * **1995** \- Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere
  * **1997** \- Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites
  * **1998** \- AOL goes after X-Files fansites
  * **2000** \- Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites
  * **2000** \- [Anne Rice anne rices again](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Spec_Writer_Massacre)
  * **2001** \- [Tripod Massacre](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Tripod_Massacre)
  * **2001** \- Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN
  * **2001** \- [The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Bronze_Posting_Board)
  * **2002** \- FFN bans porn
  * **2002** \- FFN bans RPF
  * **2003** \- [Gryffindor Tower implodes](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gryffindor_Tower)
  * **2004** \- FFN bans script format
  * **2005** \- FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  * **2005** \- Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded
  * **2005** \- Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again
  * **2006** \- [Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sakura_Lemon_Fanfiction_Archive)
  * **2007** \- Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal
  * **2007** \- Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids
  * **2008** \- [Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash_Cotillion)
  * **2009** \- GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  * **2009** \- Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted
  * **2009** \- Marvel gets scans_daily deleted
  * **2009** \- [imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Imeem)
  * **2010** \- FFN forums purged for inactivity
  * **2010** \- DeviantArt purges adult fanfic
  * **2010** \- [Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Literate_Union)
  * **2011** \- [Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Delicious)
  * **2011** \- China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org
  * **2012** \- [major FFN crackdown on porn](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Critics_United)
  * **2012** \- Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic
  * **2013** \- Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content
  * **2014** \- Quizilla shuts down
  * **2014** \- China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors
  * **2014** \- Blip.tv deletes vids
  * **2014** \- Viddler deletes vids
  * **2015** \- Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
  * **2016** \- y!Gallery deleted
  * **2016** \- [Elfwood goes offline](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Elfwood)
  * **2016** \- [Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Audiofic_Archive)
  * **2017** \- Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama
  * **2017** \- Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad
  * **2018** \- Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs
  * **2018** \- Tumblr announces NSFW ban
  * **2018** \- Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning
  * **2019** \- China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

  * Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.
  * Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.
  * Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.
  * Fans grudge reported each other.
  * Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

_This_ is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

#fandom history #fandom meta


	3. Super duper neutral and unbiased is my middle name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Context for both posts

Those two chapters are just the plain tumblr posts, but of course, much of what made them interesting was the conversation they generated. The first one was interesting for the additions, the second for the misconceptions.

**Engagement with the posts:**

The first post has 19,172 likes and 17,871 reblogs. There are about 75 responses or reblogs with commentary, around 7 of them from me. (I think I'm missing some stuff here. God knows what Tumblr has done in the meantime, deleting people, hiding things, etc. **ETA:** Yes, I'm definitely missing stuff. See end note.)

The second post has 21,188 likes and 17,054 reblogs. There are about 551 responses or reblogs with commentary, around 60 of them from me.

The most recent reblog of each was… about 30 minutes ago.

But even if that's from seeing them on AO3, the prior reblogs were from February 21st and March 1st respectively. Both posts have remained consistently active since I originally posted them.

To give a little perspective, I have something like 1,700 tumblr followers, and when I posted the first of these, I probably had closer to 1,200. I am _not_ an especially popular tumblr. These posts went viral because the topic is something that consumes us as fans on an internet that is rapidly failing us. Tumblr was never great, but in the middle of that era, we got complacent just as we did on Livejournal before it. Verizon sounding the death knell for Tumblr so soon after the first post ensured that they'd get reblogged until the day the blue hell site finally crumbles and closes.

At the height of their popularity, my offline friends would roll their eyes at how often they saw them going by on their dashes. Someone had another offline fandom friend rec one of them to her!

**Archiving the posts:**

Now, why am I archiving them? To be honest, it wouldn't have occurred to me. Someone specifically asked if I was going to, and then March Meta Matters came along, and I thought _why not?_

Part of the issue with archiving these on AO3, to me, is that they're not really meta as-is. They're clickbait listicles. As I told the requester, I felt they needed a little _more_ to make sense on AO3 as a work with an author instead of as a collaborative list on Fanlore or something. On the other hand, there is _plenty_ to say about them, and a lot of it isn't even about the deletions themselves.

Based on my tumblr experience, those are fairly high reblog:like ratios too, and a lot of no-comment reblogs had some tag commentary as well. The first one is a typically low level of commentary. The second has a lot more discussion than is typical.

I also tend to respond to comments as new top-level posts because tumblr's comment/response feature is garbage. (There are no actual URLs for that type of comment, unlike a reblog, making them awful to interact with later.) So between those spinoff posts, asks, references in other posts, people showing up in my tumblr chat, and so on, these posts actually generated quite a bit of engagement beyond the numbers above.

**Background of Post 1:**

Some time around November 20th, 2018, a bunch of anti-anti/pro-shipper tumblrs were suddenly deleted. It was a bit of a Strikethrough situation, and no one knew what was going on. I'm not sure why I wasn't hit. Maybe I'm just a lot less popular. As I recall, people had asked me to weigh in on what was going on, and I'd been talking about deletions in other posts. That gave me the idea to make a little post listing some of the bigger past deletions, especially things like Strikethrough.

I think my general idea was: "Hey, guys, this stuff happens a lot, but the current wave doesn't seem like that big of a deal when you put it in context."

As I recall, this truly was meant as a conversation prompt, asking people what other deletions they remembered.

And then Tumblr announced the NSFW ban.

Oops. I guess Tumblr's strikethrough really was the beginning of the end, just like LJ's was. Needless to say, that post got popular _fast_.

**Background of Post 2:**

A year after post 1, I was still seeing reblogs, many of them of the long, messy versions with lots of added bullet points. TBH, I am not currently seeing some of these, so I wonder if people have deleted or blocked me or if I'm actually remembering a discussion on a different post… I guess I'll find out as I dig through my #fandom meta posts this month.

I wanted to do an updated version where I pruned some of the tl;dr but also added a lot of the best stuff to the top-level post in one single clear list.

My objective was to rally Tumblr fans to care about fandom history and to fear the slow death of Tumblr and prepare to leave and/or archive things while there's still lots of time to do it in a controlled way. I also wanted to push back against various anti-fujoshi, anti-AO3, and anti-kink discourse that is common on Tumblr. This was a big theme of the reblogs on post 1, though not of the original post itself.

As far as I know, all of the information I included in post 2 is factual. I would never repeat fandom history information I thought to be false. But let me be very clear:

_Post 2 is propaganda._

I make no apologies for this. The post achieved what it was supposed to at the time… But in the time since then, something odd has happened: people have started to contact me to ask to use it as the basis of book chapters and history exhibits. I have started to get more and more reblogs referring to it as an exhaustive, complete, or authoritative list and being surprised that it does not include thing X or thing Y--as though X and Y must therefore be extremely obscure.

It's been canonized as Official Fandom History.

Fuck.

**Post 2 as Propaganda:**

I don't have any problem making clickbait-y, emotionally manipulative posts, but it has started to make me awfully nervous to see this kind of content treated as an authoritative source. I normally wear my agenda on my sleeve. It has become very clear that people are not able to detect it here.

So if you too, dear reader, want to use these lists as the basis for some other fandom history work, _especially_ if it's a history exhibit or a school paper or something with a higher standard than a tumblr post, please do! But first, let me give you some important context so you're not just repeating me uncritically.

I used several criteria to pick the items for list 2:

First, I wanted a list that wouldn't fill up more than a screen or two so that people could see the whole thing and get a sense of its size without being overwhelmed.

Second, the first post got a bunch of responses like "Wow, this is scary! It was one per year back then!" and I remember thinking "Hah! You think it's restricted to the few years in this post?" For post 2, I intentionally expanded the span of years but also looked for one incident per year. If I really liked an item, I'd include a second one for the same year, but I was very much looking for a specific time pattern to create that same "Oh shit, every single year?!" feeling the first post gave people.

The point of the post is to make it look like they've held steady forever and are thus a current danger you should do something about today by donating to AO3, archiving some fandom history, etc. That's not a research conclusion: that's an agenda. For all I know, there could be 30 more significant deletions one of these years but zero the others. I wasn't looking, so I have no idea. I _do not know_ whether deletions have gotten better or worse since the 90s.

Third, I picked some items for humor and reblogability. There are many authors on my shitlist who have censored or attacked fandom many other times. Anne Rice is just the _funniest_ of the lot.

Fourth, I wanted to include non-fic things explicitly to point out that the issue crosses different types of fanwork. I wanted to sound the alarm about how much _more_ danger some of these other fanworks are in. I specifically went looking for some vid and art deletions to round out my list.

Fifth, I wanted to include some of the places younger or different fans have hung out that weren't familiar to me and thus weren't in the first post. That means places like Quizilla and Wattpad. I know fuckall about these. I have _extremely poor_ citations for them. No, I can't tell you about the Warriorcats thing. It's something a commenter on Post 1 mentioned. I kind of regret including it because people constantly ask for receipts, and I don't have any. In fact, I've had some fans ask if it's some _other_ Wattpad deletion where the deleted people were plagiarizing assholes who tried to claim they were unfairly deleted. (No, as far as I can tell from the scant details, these are separate Wattpad dramas the same year.)

Sixth, I was intentionally looking for times people have gone after m/m content or after women. I was especially interested in times fujoshi have been in actual danger to refute the constant tumblr discourse about how fujoshi are the oppressors and never face any real problems.

Seventh, I went looking for some anime-centric list items because anime fandom often gets left out of history stuff, and I wanted this post to be relatable and alarming to a wide range of fans on Tumblr.

Why do some of these have Fanlore links and others don't? Sometimes, it's because I have better receipts on one than another. Partly, it's that I got lazy and wanted to post before Tumblr managed to eat my post and destroy my hours of work.

The list items were mostly drawn from my personal fandom history, from Fanlore, or from comments people made on Post 1.

Fanlore is very weak on anime fandom. While I used to be heavily into anime in the early 00s, I too have only a cursory knowledge of major anime fandom events. Sakura Lemon is something I happen to remember from my era. In general, this list is just as bad at including that part of fandom as the majority of other fandom history, meta, and academic work coming out of a K/S zine Media Fandom type community.

Commenters on post 1 were from a slightly broader swath of fandom than Fanlore or my own experience, but not by much.

I encourage people from a Quizilla and Wattpad background to write up their own experiences, including on Fanlore. I really, really encourage anime fans to write up their own history. It's a gaping hole in the easily-accessible fandom meta. It's an embarrassing weakness of Fanlore.

I have some posts and other meta thoughts I'll be archiving later this month, but I simply wasn't that active or that interested in fandom history and preservation yet when I was in anime fandom.

I also have a strong bias towards fan_fic_ specifically. I got into vidding in 2010, and that history is something I've also looked into a fair bit. I've never been very interested in fan art or its history.

I'd say I have a better grasp of non-English, non-US fanfic history than many people writing meta in English, but that is a very low bar. The Chinese stuff is recent, dramatic, and about m/m content, so it was an obvious choice to include here. I'm sure there are major deletions elsewhere that are equally interesting. (FWIW, if I were trying to investigate such things, I'd take a look at fandom in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Korean, or Japanese first. Maybe Italian or Indonesian.)

This is getting long and I'm getting an eye strain headache, so I'll end this here. Chapter 4 will be supplemental comments, e.g. from my own reblogs or from spinoff posts.

Please feel free to chat in comments, whether about fandom purges or about the sorry state of meta outside of a narrow band of fandom history or the ethics of clickbait posts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: Fucking hell, tumblr.
> 
> Okay, I found the big reblog chain from the first one. Most of the reblogs were actually for greywash/fizzygins, not me. Finding a fandom post while knowing "Uh, grey something...? Gin-themed?" and what their header image looks like is... tricky.
> 
> Here's someone's backup of the most popular reblog chain that most of the rest spun off of:
> 
> https://notapaladin.wordpress.com/2019/10/24/a-history-of-fandom-purges-3/


	4. Other posts and reblogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Assorted related content that was part of the discussion around the two posts

A post of mine from November 20, 2018, four days before the first Fandom Purges post:

> **Yes, You Should be Afraid**
> 
> The sky isn’t falling, Tumblr isn’t deleting all the dirty fan art on purpose, and fandom isn’t going to leave Tumblr tomorrow.
> 
> However…
> 
> Once a site starts using bots to delete content willy-nilly, it has a serious problem and is not a safe home for fandom. In this case, the aim was to get rid of child pornography. (_Actual_ child pornography.) The problem was already so out of control that they hit a bunch of innocent blogs by accident.
> 
> If this happened once, it’s going to happen again. It’s going to keep happening until Tumblr’s limited staff is so overstretched that they stop even a vague pretense of caring about false positives and accidental deletions of other content.
> 
> I’ve already seen several posts going around telling people to “calm down” and assuring us that Tumblr isn’t out to get us. Tumblr is not out to get us, but they’re not out to help fandom either, and you should definitely _not_ calm down.
> 
> Make your other accounts now.
> 
> Have somewhere to go when Tumblr finishes imploding.

Little did I know!

This post [led to some discussions during December](https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/180765740404/yes-you-should-be-afraid) about going back to DW or at least making a backup DW. A few people confused DW for LJ or pimped Pillowfort.

My most notable addition provides a snapshot of how the ban was progressing in early December, 2018:

> My big issue is that I can’t see the blogs I care about in the tags. A lot of the discussions I have on tumblr start by going to either the ‘fandom meta’ tag or the ‘fandom history’ tag and looking for interesting posts. I don’t really look at my dash. Tags are vital to how I use tumblr.
> 
> The same blogs that have a lot of meta often also get flagged as nsfw, either because they engage with explicit content or because they piss off a lot of people and get reported often.
> 
> Looking at those two tags today, I am not seeing most of the usernames I remember seeing there recently, including my own. The content that is gone was all text-only. It wasn’t even about sex. A lot of it wasn’t even about shipping! It may be gone because it contained links, or it may be that those accounts have been hidden from tag searches. Either way…
> 
> Tumblr is making it difficult for me to find people to have safe-for-work text conversations with.


End file.
